moving house

[the_siobhan]

Every once in a while, I ponder the value of moving my blog completely off of LJ and onto my own domain.

Peoples who do that, can I have your feedback? Pros? Cons? Pains in the ass?

xthlcm, kalmn, the_fury, I'm looking at you guys.

Comments

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The technical exercise is tolerably interesting if you're into Perl/PHP/Unix, (arse-achingly dull otherwise) but Running A Weblog is a different thing from Running A Livejournal. If you're just emitting words, don't much care about feedback and don't use LJ's 'friend' functionality, then I don't know that you'd notice the difference.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Don't you dare leave us. ;-)

[okoshun.livejournal.com]

I don't have a separate blog, so I can't comment on that part.

I find personally that when people migrate off of LJ I just don't read them unless there's an RSS feed that I can read on LJ. I occasionally go to read kalmn's blog around once a month..if I remember.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

there is a feed: betsys_blog.

[okoshun.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Thanks! :)

[xthlcm.livejournal.com]

Having your own domain is nice for, say, email and web presence.

However, I found that when I kept my blog on my own domain, very few people ever left comments. Even with an LJ RSS feed, there just isn't the same sense of community you get from LJ.

I think what I'd like to do (once I'm out of school and have time for things like this again) is keep an infrequently updated work / travel blog on my own domain, and keep the personal stuff on LJ.

That said, I would highly recommend Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com) for a provider. They're inexpensive, they have great services, and their CEO is certifiably weird. They'll even automatically set up WordPress (one of the better blogging platforms out there) with a click of a button. Wordpress is nice in that it's pretty easily tweakable (PHP isn't the hardest language to learn) and there are plenty of themes out there that you can use.

[the-fury.livejournal.com]

Pros:
It's easy to get the look and feel you want, without paying special fees to LJ for the privilege. This goes beyond simple HTML as well - you can have different looks for different topics.

Also, there's a feeling of ownership that I never had with LJ. I'm not too sure what it is, seeing that (my words == my words), but it's quite pronounced. Enough so that it outweighs all of the cons/pains in the ass.

Cons:
No one comments. Ever. Even if you use an RSS feed. There's an LJ synch for Wordpress that will reconnected with the LJ folks. I'm not too sure where I found it, but I can search again for you.

Pains in the ass:
Comment spam. This is the biggest pain in the ass. The bastards will send wave after wave of poorly written comments regarding Texas Hold'em. What they won't do is mannually log on and see what's happening. I'm under thair radar, so the super-simple brain dead captcha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha)-esque add-on I made has stopped all of them so far.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The comment spam hadn't occurred to me. That might just be the deal-breaker.

[disastrid.livejournal.com]

when mmdy was ongoing, i was getting as many as a thousand spammed comments a day. sophisticated filters only blocked about 70% of them.

and it's true, you can have thousands of readers, but very rarely does anyone comment. unless, of course, it's some sort of bullshit anonymous dissing. if you don't have anything nice to say ... say it on a syndicated blog! hurrah!

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think I've let myself be talked out of it.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Was it just to put it in your domain? (It's possible to embed your livejournal in web sites.)

I've never set up a blog off of livejournal. I do find that when people move off, I add their RSS feed to my LJ friends list and read them that way. However, I find that I comment less, because I usually have to go to another site to comment, and because the interactive and community elements to blogs seem less than those offered by LJ journals.

[shnells.livejournal.com]

please don't. i enjoy reading your posts. i allow a certain amount of time to read lj. i don't really have too much time for much else. if you move, i won't get to see what you're writing!

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that if I did it, I'd set up an RSS feed.

I've been pretty much talked out of it, though - so it looks like for now at least I'm going to be staying here.

Re: moving house

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

done it, will probably do it again, simply because i like the control it gives (much easier backup, including comments; no third party system to learn for the appearance of the thing), but next time i'll synch it separately with my LJ instead of just providing an RSS feed. technically this isn't a big deal if you already know what you're doing sysadmin-wise; if you don't you'll have bigger things to worry about at first. :)

drawbacks:

- if you want to be read by most LJ poeple, you have to establish an RSS feed, syndicate it on LJ, and then watch it because people won't know the difference when it comes to commenting, and you can't get comments from a syndicated feed mailed to you. or figure out how to synchronise between your blog and your LJ otherwise, which can be done, but is a PITA.

- comment spam. *bleagh*. you'll end up having to make commenters jump through hoops because of it.

- even fewer substantive discussions than here because comments on blogs are even harder to track than comments here for anyone other than the blog owner.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i think i use the two for different things. currently, i couldn't tell you exactly what the difference is, but i know there is one.

moving your archives would be a royal pain in the ass. i don't even know how you'd go about it.

setting up a blogger account to upload to your own domain is pretty easy, so on the technical side, that's not a problem.

major drawbacks: commenting is weird. no one can keep track of it but the blog owner, as the fishie says. also, no private/friendslocked posts.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The comment thing is actually an issue - not that I'm addicted to lots of comments, but it's hard to tell how my posts are going over with no feedback.